BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A 'Zone of Privacy' With Calculated Polish

Two leitmotifs run through Hillary Rodham Clinton's wildly hyped new memoir, ''Living History.''

One has to do with her changing hairstyles, which are discussed in detail at least a half dozen times, as they morphed with Madonna-like frequency from long to short, from frizzy to hair-banded to carefully coiffed.

The other has to do with Mrs. Clinton's penchant for blaming enemies, from political opponents to a ''vast right-wing conspiracy,'' for her and her husband's failures and travails.

The first underscores the chameleonlike quality she's always shared with her husband, the belief, as he once put it, that character ''is a journey, not a destination.'' The second underscores both the highly partisan atmosphere of the 1990's and the Clintons' reluctance to assume full responsibility for their own mistakes and evasions.

Mrs. Clinton, who has repeatedly invoked a ''zone of privacy'' around her and her family, talks in this book about noticing Bill Clinton's narrow wrists and tapered fingers when she first met him at Yale Law School in the early 1970's; about wanting ''to wring Bill's neck'' after he admitted to her that he'd had ''an inappropriate intimacy'' with Monica Lewinsky; about subsequently going into ''regular marital counseling to determine whether or not we were going to salvage our marriage.''

With the exception of such revelations (most of which were publicized in a leak to The Associated Press last week and in Mrs. Clinton's interview with Barbara Walters, which was broadcast on ABC on Sunday), ''Living History'' is a mishmash of pious platitudes about policy (not unlike those found in the author's earlier book ''It Takes a Village''); robotic asides about her official duties in Washington (not unlike those found in her Martha Stewart-esque book ''An Invitation to the White House''); and by now familiar accounts of Hillary Rodham Clinton's metamorphosis over the years from Goldwater girl to liberal student activist to high-powered lawyer to first lady to senator from New York.

Overall the book has the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat show.

Mrs. Clinton is fond of talking about herself in lofty terms as a symbolic figure. ''While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it.'' Her 562-page book is in many ways an artifact of the curious age in which we live: an age in which confession and ''sharing'' have become talking points for public figures, and scandal translates instantly into celebrity. An age in which tough, talented women can ascend to high political office but often experience their greatest popularity when they are perceived as less-threatening victims.

The book struggles to turn the author's many contradictions -- the policy wonk who poses for Vogue; the self-righteous ''politics of meaning'' crusader who made a quick $100,000 in the commodities market; the big-picture reformer who has begun to position herself as a centrist -- into a narrative of maturation and reconciliation.

It is a book that purports to deal with the many controversies and scandals in Bill Clinton's campaigns and presidency, presumably to get these issues behind her before she contemplates running for the White House herself. Yet the book skates over the problems the Clinton administration faced in its rocky debut and in the impeachment crisis and skims over details of matters like Whitewater and ''travelgate'' while expending a startling amount of space on her trips abroad and her personal appearance.

Some of her asides can be funny, like recounting how she and an aide worked out ''a system of hand gestures, like those of a coach and a pitcher, so that I would know when to smooth my hair down or wipe the lipstick off my teeth.'' Many, however, feel more like women's magazine filler. We learn that Bill was flummoxed when Hillary had her hair permed in 1974, but we do not learn why billing records from the Rose Law Firm, included in the independent counsel's subpoenas, mysteriously surfaced in the White House, after having been missing for months. We learn that Mrs. Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, wore long, flowing tunics over loose pants during a trip to India and Pakistan, but we never learn about President Clinton's controversial last-minute pardons.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The Gennifer Flowers episode is dealt with in a highly cursory manner. Of a newspaper article in which Ms. Flowers claimed that she had had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton, Mrs. Clinton writes that her husband ''told me it wasn't true.'' Later in the Monica Lewinsky mess in August 1998, before Mr. Clinton told his wife of his involvement with that intern, their adviser Robert S. Barnett tells Mrs. Clinton that ''you have to face the fact that something about this might be true.'' She reports that her response was, ''My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me.''

Though Mrs. Clinton admits that she made missteps with her health-care plan (its failure contributed to the Republicans' taking control of both the House and Senate in 1994 for the first time in 40 years), she tends to attribute many of her and her husband's difficulties before and during his presidency to ''the politics of personal destruction.''

She blames negative ads and a broken promise from the Carter White House for insuring her husband's failure to recapture the Arkansas governor's mansion in 1980. She shrugs off travelgate as ''the first manifestation of an obsession for investigation that persisted into the next millennium.'' And she characterizes Whitewater as ''a limitless investigation of our lives'' the purpose of which was ''to discredit the president and the administration and slow down its momentum.''

Later Mrs. Clinton's anger at Kenneth W. Starr overrode her anger at her husband over Monica Lewinsky. ''And the more I believed Starr was abusing his power,'' she writes, ''the more I sympathized with Bill -- at least politically.''

In these pages Mrs. Clinton observes that it was she, not her husband, who decided not to turn over Whitewater documents to the press, and that it was she who strenuously argued against appointing an independent counsel. This book ratifies the dynamic between the Clintons depicted in the press and in memoirs by White House officials, that Bill Clinton was the more indecisive, forgiving one, while Hillary was the more combative, organized one.

He was the optimist; she was the worrier. He was a garrulous, boyish multitasker; she was the highly focused worker who kept her own counsel. The Monica Lewinsky imbroglio made her feel more isolated: ''I also worried,'' she writes, ''that the armor I had acquired might distance me from my true emotions, that I might turn into the brittle caricature some critics accused me of being.''

The least self-conscious portions of this book deal with Mrs. Clinton's childhood and her memories of her mother, a closet Democrat, and her father, a ''rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican'' who warned Hillary about the perils of waste. ''To this day,'' she writes, ''I put uneaten olives back in the jar, wrap up the tiniest pieces of cheese.''

In this book's opening chapters she writes about growing up in a Chicago suburb where going to McDonald's was reserved for ''special occasions,'' where neighborhood kids thought it was fun to pedal through the haze of town trucks spraying DDT in the summer twilight, where she and her brothers spent more time playing board games (like Monopoly and Clue) and card games than watching television.

These sections have a homey immediacy lacking in the rest of ''Living History,'' which for all its roller-coaster drama -- all the political scandals, marital woes and startling comebacks and reinventions -- radiates the faintly stale air (particularly unnerving in the audio versions of the memoir) of being the carefully rehearsed and elided statements of a professional pol intent on turning a book tour into the first leg of another campaign.